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Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land
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About This Book
"I am a child of the American West, a landscape so rich and wide that my culture trembles with terror before its power." So begins Taylor Brorby's Boys and Oil, a haunting, bracingly honest memoir about growing up gay amidst the harshness of rural North Dakota, "a place where there is no safety in a ravaged landscape of mining and fracking." In visceral prose, Brorby recounts his upbringing in the coalfields; his adolescent infatuation with books; and how he felt intrinsically different from other boys. Now an environmentalist, Brorby uses the destruction of large swathes of the West as a metaphor for the terror he experienced as a youth. From an assault outside a bar in an oil boom town to a furtive romance, and from his awakening as an activist to his arrest at the Dakota Access Pipeline, Boys and Oil provides a startling portrait of an America that persists despite well-intentioned legal protections.
Reviews
"Brorby has written not only a truly great memoir, but also a frighteningly relevant one that speaks to the many battles we still have left to fight."
"A lyrical meditation ..."
"Brorby writes movingly ..."
"In the end, he writes, 'I no longer feel ashamed for the person I am,' a realization hard won over the course of a well-crafted narrative ..."
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